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Subject:
From:
Cornelius Edward Hamelberg <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
The Gambia and related-issues mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 5 Mar 2007 23:58:37 +0100
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I'm sure that this and many other items that have surfaced on this list serve ( on Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal ) have not been - strictly speaking, Gambian-related issues, except for the fact that more 20% of Sierra Leone’s teaching force and a more sizeable number of our refugees have been dispersed throughout the Gambia. 
The Sierra Leone presidential election is scheduled to take place on January 28th. 2007.
We have also been discussing some Gambian issues on our Leonenet the past few months. 
This should have been a follow up on Bantaba on which I tried to post this a few seconds ago to no avail. It’s on the theme/thread that I started on Chief Hinga Norman. I am still banned and understand that some people must obey orders. Sometimes obeying orders only make things a lot worse of course. 
http://www.gambia.dk/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3167 
But the subject matter is the same West African political malaise, transgressions of what ought to be justice, transparency, accountability and it’s about the helplessness of people trapped in the mire of absolute lack of people power. 
There will be no further postings on this thread unless someone responds to it.  My blog will soon be accessible to all without any interference from censorship or slavery etc and I do write under my own name. It will be accessible when you will need to spend more than a whole day going through it. When there’s a lot of beef on the bone. 
Yes, as all those who read Macbeth know, death and even murder is always a very sensitive matter, not only for heartless or tearful politicians. We’re here involved and of course we are afraid of neither Virginia Woolf nor any of the widowers or grass widowers. 
Do you remember the Concord Times Interview with Berewa? You remember what he said? His exact words culminating in “I will do every thing that it is right to win but I won't do things that are wrong just to win.”? 
I post these articulate links which are no crime and I do not post in lieu of words that I can myself write, but only in support of what I say, as I was trained to do. (I would post all of Professor Abdul Karim Bangura’s readable books if those directly readable links would throw more light on whatever is. I could dispense with these economical links entirely. They are not my crutches, not on the telephone either, or face to face with anyone. I can speak for myself and express myself as well as anyone, whenever I choose to do so about matters that concern not only me. 
http://www.concordtimessl.com/bintumani.htm 
http://www.concordtimessl.com/archive.htm 
I am not yet angry. I am merely waiting for further provocation from Kabbah himself or Berewa. 
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=sv&q=The+Life+of+Chief+Hinga+Norman 
Interesting article here about the Godfather of hypocrisy: 
http://www.christian-monitor.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=356&Itemid=36 
Two important issues raised both under the same category of hypocrisy: 
The first was widely discussed in international legal circles: Kabbah should/ would have taken the witness stand and received a battering from Chief Hinga Norman’s defence attorney. He would have received more than a battering if I had been Chief Hinga Norman’s lawyer, although I’m quite sure that he would have agreed to other compromise propositions, instead of opting for the case to proceed any further. Few know how much it has cost for it to come to this. 
I look forward to JLM’s take on this: 
“However, notwithstanding its supremacy and independence, in practice the Special Court does succumb to political manoeuvrings as was evidenced in the case of Norman’s petition to have the President testify in his defence. The court ruled against the idea, which to keen observers of the court suggests acquiescence to political pressure if not interference. It followed veiled threats from the corridors of power that if the court rules in favour of Norman, for Kabbah to appear as his witness, the president would go to the Supreme Court, the very court whose powers he had slighted, for it to decide whether the Special Court has the authority to subpoena a sitting president, which would have created a constitutional crisis and put the Special Court in even more crisis. Several months earlier, in the case of the former leader of Liberia, the Special Court ruled against Charles Taylor when he challenged the jurisdiction of the court to indict a sitting head of state, a ruling paradigm that serves as a pointer to the court’s unsound judgment while capitulating to political pressure.” 
As for this, it’s like - as Malcolm (X) said about asking a man who has no morals to exercise his “moral conscience” Or a hypocrite to reincarnate into Mr. Sincere, or as we hear on CNN so often, for a leopard to change it’s spots, or as I read in the Tanach a few days ago, Jeremiah 13.23, “Can a Cushite/ Ethiopian/Moor change his skin colour or a leopard his spots? - So too can you – in whom evil is ingrained – do good? ” - or - as we say in Sierra Leone, about the thieving chimpanzee, “Monkey noh dae lef im black han”/ a monkey does stop doing its usual tricks. 
“Similarly, the government would also now try to show their sympathy, belated as it may sound, over the sad loss of Norman and in the process they would endeavour to extricate and distance themselves from the activities of the Special Court and what befell their ‘colleague’.” 
Remember the bad treatment that the chief was subjected to immediately after Sierra Leone security forces storming his offices where he sat as a minister of the Interior, a cabinet member of Kabbah’s government being first summarily dumped into the darkness and dankness of that mosquito- infested dungeon in Bonthe Sherbro Island, which used to be a slave holders prison, for those unfortunate Africans awaiting deportation to the West, for a lifetime of working and living in slavery. 
Berewa and Kabbah should continue with their continuity project if it’s not too late to change course. Kabbah should not proclaim or confess an ignorance that his High Commissioner Professor Cyril Patrick Foray (who also died) did not have about any phase of the war that Chief Hinga Norman fought. 

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